For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michał Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next. A push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout. Ambient music is rarely so sonically challenging. Jacaszek has recorded for Ghostly International, Miasmah, Gusstaff Records and Experimedia and other labels. This is his first release for Touch.

Michał Jacaszek writes:

"When poets and writers declare their enchantment for the forms of nature, they often use musical terms as methaphors. Visual artists' creations often resemble graphic partitas, when recapturing the rhythms of landscapes.Confirming, in a way, these musical intuitions, composers write great music deeply inspired by birdsongs, wind rustlings, waves repetitions etc.

TouchRadio 114 | Pascal Wyse

To call this field recording would be crediting the situation with more adventure than it deserves. At five in the morning, with a hangover starting to percolate, the ideal conditions are surely to just roll over, hit record and go back to sleep – and that is pretty much what happened here. End of disclaimer.

Boats, whether out at sea or in harbour, have a particular vocabulary of sounds. On the water, they are masked by the white noise of the ocean, in which – as many sailors have reported – you can hear almost any sound imaginable. Moored up, where things are quieter, the water laps and slaps the hull while the wind plays aeolian harp on the mast.

That rigging sound is often a chorus of tapping lines against masts, but this particular boat – a cruising yacht with a Bermuda rig, moored at Yarmouth after a day’s sailing – had an unusually musical voice, sounding clear notes as the wind passed through its structure. At sea this was a contented hum, but at night it felt much more ominous.

The tones in this piece were recorded in one of the sleeping cabins in the stern, a little resonant box. Of course, there has been some processing – mainly to remove the snoring of sailo

Faith is the first full-length sound release by media researcher and curator Heitor Alvelos under his own name. Heitor Alvelos has been a long-time on/off collaborator of Touch, having on occasion provided photography and stage visuals for Biosphere, Fennesz, BJNilsen, Rafael Toral and Philip Jeck, as well as releasing sound pieces under the aliases Autodigest, Antifluffy and Before Surgery, on Ash International, TouchRadio and The Tapeworm.

“The essence of the present piece is autobiographical: therefore the use of my own name”, the author clarifies. “And yet it aims at being resonant to others”: in this context, resonance may be regarded as both semantic and visceral, as the sound frequencies on Faith are often of the kind that “rearrange one’s organs”, to quote the recently departed Bernadette Martou. A necessity in order to carry the gravitas inherent to the subject, a confessional confrontation with the zeitgeist.

All sources have been gathered, recorded and produced throughout five decades, all the way back to a recording by Francisco Alvelos in 1972 that closes the release. Elsewhere, sounds have been processed to various degrees, the bookends retaining their original contexts, others mutating into deep abstraction. Overall, they flow as one single composition, evocative and foreboding in equal measures.

Yann Novak is a sound and visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. Through the use of sound, light and space, he explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on the present moment and alter our perception of time. Novak’s work, whether conceptual or rooted in phenomenon, are informed by his investigations of presence, stillness and mindfulness. His works can be experienced as architectural interventions, sound diffusions, audiovisual installations and performances, durational performances, concerts and recorded sound-works.

OFFING is the moniker for sound explorations by Oakland California based artist Chris Duncan. After a decade of functioning primarily as a visual artist, recent years have found Duncan applying learned behaviors in image making to sound works. The open ended, often improvised, compositions are a sonic equivalent to his paintings- slowly built atmospheres that are the accumulation of simple gestures, looped and layered to the point of transcendence, responding to light, shadow and the ocean.

Mike Harding has been running the audio-visual label Touch for 30+ years and in this period has acquired much experience and information on disseminating cultural sounds to a wider audience. Since its first release in 1982, Touch has created sonic and visual productions that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time.

Touch Radio 113 | Simon Scott

The word 'gibbet' is used both to refer to an executional structure and to a hanging iron cage that used to display the remains of executed prisoners; when someone is thusly displayed, it is known as ‘gibbeting’.

Recording the wooden gibbet in 2012, believed to be haunted burial site and located at Caxton in Cambridgeshire, to capture the sound of the gallows wood (elm) and saproxylic (dead wood) invertebrates (beetles) that lived within it was a challenge because of the vast amount of traffic that passes by. It is located beside a busy roundabout (A428 to Cambridge) and I initially found it difficult to capture the wooden gibbet creaking and moving in the way I had envisaged. I therefore used contact microphones to get inside the construction. I was inspired by the grim history of this location, the place of multiple murders and capital punishment, and also from reading about Bernie Krause (b.1938) who, on the CD included in his wonderful book "Wild Soundscapes", explains that “recordings are an illusion… the best microphone systems and recorders cannot possibly reproduce exactly what our ears hear in the holophonic way that we hear it” (2002). He documented acoustic environments that faced dramatic change or extinction but often needed to recreate the sounds of nature by double tracking or changing microphone placement.

This location has changed dramatically recently as a McDonalds fast food restaurant opened on this site recently.

Touch Radio 112 | Bethan Parkes

This composition features unprocessed recordings from Krafla Geothermal Power Station and the nearby mudpools and steam vents of Hverir in Northern Iceland. The recordings were made in June 2014, on the Wildeye sound recording course led by Chris Watson and Jez Riley French, using a SoundField SPS200 and JrF contact microphones.

The composition draws upon the spatial experiences of recording at these sites, journeying from the booming, all-encompassing drone emitting from the boreholes; through the uncontained, explosive energy of steam vents and bubbling mud-pools; and into the inner sonic worlds of the metal pipes and geodesic structures that punctuated the lava field.

FOLIO 001 | Josephine Michel & Mika Vainio "Halfway to White"

With a new imprint, TOUCHFOLIO, Touch introduces a new series of bespoke hardback book and CD publications, produced to the highest specifications and continuing 33 years’ experience of audiovisual publishing.

TO:99 | Biosphere Deathprod "Stator"

Artwork and photography is by Jon Wozencroft. The CD was mastered by Helge Sten [Deathprod].

stator (ˈsteɪtə) n

1. (Electrical Engineering) The stationary part of a rotary machine or device, esp of a motor or generator
2. (Aeronautics) A system of nonrotating radially arranged parts within a rotating assembly, esp the fixed blades of an axial flow compressor in a gas turbine
[C20: from Latin: one who stands (by), from stāre to stand]

Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen, a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music.

He is well known for his "ambient techno" and "arctic ambient" styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources.

His track "Novelty Waves" was used for the 1995 campaign of Levi's. His 1997 album Substrata is generally seen as one of the all time classic ambient albums [1].

Biosphere regularly performs live during electronic music festivals and in clubs throughout Europe and various other locales around the world. Live performances usually consist of Jenssen performing improvisations or variations on newer tracks on a laptop while video art is projected behind him; for example, full-screen video art was projected in his Picturehouse cinema tour in April 2006. Although these performances are rarely tied specifically to a recent album release, the uptempo material from the Bleep and Microgravity/Patashnik era is rarely featured in Biosphere performances.

He has been working with Touch since 1999...

Deathprod is a musical pseudonym used by Norwegian artist Helge Sten. Sten began creating music under this name starting in 1991, culminating with a box set of most of his recorded work being released in 2004. Simply titled Deathprod, the collection contains three albums along with a bonus disc of previously unreleased, rare, and deleted tracks.

On recordings, Sten is usually credited with "Audio Virus", a catchall term for "homemade electronics, old tape echo machines, ring modulators, filters, theremins, samplers and lots of electronic stuff."[1]

Sten also did the mixing of the album "PB" by the Norwegian artist Per Bergersen.

Sten is a member of Supersilent and works as a producer on many releases on the Norwegian label Rune Grammofon. He has also produced Motorpsycho and has worked with Biosphere on an Arne Nordheim tribute album called Nordheim Transformed.

Mastered by Helge Sten at Audio Virus LAB. This work was commissioned by Tape To Zero. Thanks to Kjetil Husebø.

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